Thought Leadership

An interview with Immediate Media

Guy Jones is Director of Digital Revenue & Operations at Immediate Media, the publisher of more than 70 premium brands, including Radio Times, Bike Radar, BBC Good Food and Top Gear.

Immediate has experienced phenomenal growth in its programmatic business – with revenues increasing more than 300% as outlined in a Rubicon Project case study: register to download the case study here.

We caught up with Guy to understand Immediate’s commercial strategy and the reasons behind this success:

On a Dedicated Team and Going Channel Agnostic

Immediate Media has had a relationship with Rubicon Project for a couple of years now, but over the past 12 months we’ve seen significant revenue acceleration from the partnership. This has largely been driven by building out a centralised programmatic team to focus on yield management, demand generation and leveraging first party data. This group works closely with our brand sales teams to maximize opportunities across the board.

We adopted a channel agnostic approach, removing inventory restrictions and aligning pricing across multiple sales channels. Crucially this allows us to trade with buyers based on the requirements of their brands or campaigns. And internally it not only enables us to monetize 100% of our inventory but also to value deals based on their return rather than arbitrary channel distinctions.

On the Benefits of Advertising Automation

In the simplest terms, it’s about yield management, but as well as that, it’s about generating new business from a greater number of buyers than your direct sales team can access. It will be especially interesting to see how it develops as we see smarter technology emerge like real-time pricing that dynamically prioritises between auctions, private marketplaces and guaranteed.

On Private Marketplaces

Private marketplaces are central to our approach – and we’ve seen their share grow to almost 50% of our total return on programmatic. As for data, we have recently implemented Krux as our data management platform, and over time we will grow out the breadth and depth of our data offering – both off the shelf and bespoke. With the right resourcing in place, we believe this will add even more ways of ramping up spend on our packages sold via Rubicon Project.

On Reasons for Partnering with Rubicon Project

What makes Rubicon Project a leading provider is first and foremost around its account management offering and consultative approach. But increasingly, it is also about the support of its Buyer team, who work with the agency trading desks to make trading through this channel a more frictionless process. From API integrations, to data, to automated guaranteed and holistic yield management and insights, Rubicon Project’s product roadmap is also tightly aligned with our own.